All in all, the new release Unknown Horizons 2014.1 provides a more stable gaming experience with new content and a bit of eye candy added as well.
As some of you may have noticed already, there are several big changes happening around our engine FIFE right now. As a result of this, some new features (like the color overlays spotlighted above) are only available after a new engine release, or if you're running a development snapshot.
There is more work ahead to fully adopt our code to more of those changes, like replacing the currently used guichan library with its FIFE-maintained improved fork fifechan. Look forward to advanced text styling, many new cool widgets (e.g. for in-game statistics) and full UTF-8 support!

Get Involved

Interested in helping with the development of Unknown Horizons? Great, we are looking for help in all areas and could use every available hand. Everyone can help, especially you! Check out our Get Involved page and get in touch!

All in all, the combination of Unknown Horizons 2013.3 and FIFE 0.3.5 is intended to provide a far more stable gaming experience. If you do spot a bug or notice odd behavior however, please let us know at http://bugs.unknown-horizons.org.

Get Involved

Interested in helping with the development of Unknown Horizons? Great, we are looking for help in all areas. Everyone can help! Check out our Get Involved page and get in touch with the team, we are awaiting you.

Hello everyone!We come back to you with a bug fix release for Unknown Horizons 2013.1. A nasty bug making every click on the boat builder cost money and resources was discovered by a dedicated player yesterday. Thanks for reporting the bug!

Unknown Horizons 2013.1 for Linux

You'll find the source tarball on sourceforge. Please notify us (via IRC) if you are the Unknown Horizons package maintainer for your distribution and have updated the package. We will update this post to inform everyone that a package for your distro is now available.

Get Involved

Interested in helping out with the development of Unknown Horizons? Check out our Get Involved Page. Any help is welcome!

Downloads

Unfortunately we can only provide a Windows installer for the time being. We are still awaiting the next official release of our graphics engine FIFE, as we need their newest changes. As soon as the new FIFE release is out, it will be pushed out to the Linux packages together with updates for Unknown Horizons on Linux. If you want to check out the release, please install Unknown Horizons from source, as described here: Install Unknown Horizons on linux from source.

As expected, packages for Unknown Horizons2012.1 can be found in the download section of our website. Packages are available for Windows and many Linux distributions. Downloads for the remaining Linux distributions and OS X will be updated as they become available.

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this ;-)

OpenGL - Support broken on certain netbooks - please stick to SDL in these cases. More information in our FAQ.

Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later

The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain

When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates. Working on a fix here, stay tuned.

Return the favor

If you have feedback or ideas on how we can improve your gaming experience with Unknown Horizons, please also share them on our IRC Channel or the forums!

Want to help out but aren't the coder type? Check out the list of open areas to tackle! Amongst other important tasks such as scenario writing, game design or balancing, we'd like to emphasise that Unknown Horizons is still in need for a lot of translation work. We are adding more and more content from release to release. With pootle it takes seconds to start translating Unknown Horizons to your language! Visit out pootle translation server to get familiar with the system or go to our wiki page Translators Guide for more information. Contact us on IRC if your language is missing.No matter if you want to help out with game design, writing, graphics, voice recording or programming: If you like UH, check our "Get involved" page!

If you like playing Unknown Horizons please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a motivation to all team members :-)

Heya everybody,today we proudly announce our latest release: Unknown Horizons 2011.3! Sorry for the slight delay, we think it was worth fixing some more problems to ensure you can enjoy a great release.

There is such an awesome amount of new features that we cannot include all of them in a single blog posting. We especially like to thank our new team members gscai and mihaibivol for their work during the Google Summer of Code. Check our wrap-up for details.

Putting together a short list, we'd call these the major features of 2011.3:

Complete settlement AI

Combat and diplomacy system

FIFE performance

Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr)

We especially want to thank those contributors that made this release possible: the new team members we received through the Summer of Code, all the translators that are listed >here<, wentam and orakeldel who created our new graphics, mtfk (responsible for the voice system), seblabel for his voice contributions, nmarques building OpenSUSE & Fedora packages and abeaumont for finally fixing two segfaults that were around for years, literally. Thanks for everything! You guys just rock! You can check out the complete changelog >here<.

Help Wanted

We are looking for help in all areas to keep up the current level of progress!Especially cool are graphics for new buildings which allow us to implement further increments – but of course all kinds of support are welcome, no matter if you want to help out with game design, writing, translations, graphics, voice recording or programming. If you like Unknown Horizons and want to offer your help or get started with the team, be sure to join our IRC Channel or leave us a message on the forums. We've recently created a new subforum Contributions, leave us a posting about your ideas and we will reply as soon as possible.

We want to see you play!Admittedly, we've hit some kind of dry spell concerning our gameplay video section. But then we realised there are many talented Unknown Horizons players such as you out there, who we and others would love to see in action. Therefore, grab any screen recording software of your choice, hit rec and show us how you build your settlement! Screenshots are also very appreciated. You can post links to your videos in the forum or as comment below, they will later be put on our YouTube page.

Download it!

If you already have an older version of Unknown Horizons installed, we suggest that you uninstall it before installing 2011.3!

You can find all new packages in the Downloads section of the website. The Windows installer comes with everything you need to play Unknown Horizons!Linux packages:Archlinux users can use the AUR package. A gentoo ebuild is available in the gamerlay overlay (layman -a gamerlay). Linux packages for Suse, Fedora,Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mintwill be available soon. We'll keep you posted!

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this ;-)

Player names in main menu are discarded if a different game type is chosen

Deer might experience extinction for no obvious reason. We are still tweaking our wild animal ecosystem to iron out such cases

Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later

The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain

When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates. Working on a fix here, stay tuned.

Please report any additional crashes or problems in our bugtracker and on IRC!

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy this release of Unknown Horizons. If you need support or want to leave us some feedback (please do!) contact us on IRC, the forums or via e-mail (team@unknown-horizons.org).

If you like playing the game, please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a great motivation to all team members :-)Just having finished 2011.3, we're already full of ideas and visions for 2012.1, our next release. The general focus of development at the moment seems to gear towards a fuller nature (rivers, terrain height), more content (increment 4) more support for military action (ground units) and better usability (status icons hovering over buildings, and flashing angrily if you don't treat your settlers well ;).

Three new building graphics, five new variations, no more placeholders

Performance improvements with game start and in-game

Many new and updated translations to both interface and tutorial

Vast amount of bugs fixed

A lot of polishing and balancing

We especially want to thank those contributors that made this release possible: the new team members we received through the Summer of Code, all the translators that are listed >here<, Court-Jus who contributed the campaign system, nmarques who builds OpenSUSE & Fedora and squiddy who allows us to hunt evil bugs by creating awesome test environments. Thanks for everything! You guys just rock! You can check out the complete changelog >here<.

New translations

We recently introduced glossaries for each language which are shared between the main translation file and the tutorial. This helps achieving a unified style throughout the whole game. So if you would like to start a new language, our suggestion is that you begin with translating the project Unknown Horizons Glossary.

Unknown Horizons now supports 20 languages besides English and the tutorial has 8 different versions. You will only see those in your selected language. If you would like to help with the translation of our game and its tutorial into your native language, make sure to check out our Pootle server. Ask us on IRC if your language is missing!

We also started a mailing list for everybody interested in the massive amount of work translating Unknown Horizons is: translate-UH. Any feedback, question or suggestion is highly welcome! We currently only subscribe registered pootle users, but creating a pootle account does not hurt and also allows you to contribute translations.

Random maps

This improvement could be the main reason why we thought about a new release so soon: You just need to check them out. Now :)Really, not much more to add. Great work, gscai!

Trade routes

Another very useful addition to Unknown Horizons, coded by mihaibivol. After supporting construction of own ships for quite a while, you can start to actually use them now! Don't wonder about the huge fisher boat cargo, we will alter the stats once we have more ship models available :-)

Campaigns

After supporting construction of own scenarios for quite a while, you can start to actually bundle them now! Err, too much re-utilization, sorry.Should you feel like creating scenarios is not enough, we allow everybody to contribute other parts and put them together to a large package. For help on anything while creating your very own content or with advertising it, simply join us on IRC and we surely will give lots of feedback!

We're right now looking for interested campaign authors that can tell us what the system still needs to support (we will then add it) and who also have fun writing such a campaign to ship with UH. Please contact us if you're interested!

Performance

We've been working on several bottlenecks over the last weeks. This especially includes

loading time of savegames

faster minimap drawing

generation time of random maps

caching scenario and campaign files

improving AI of our free trader

telling our deer to eat more acorns while less CPU

and several other fields.

Hopefully you also see Unknown Horizons performing better than before. Right now we can promise that with the next release 0.3.3 of our engine FIFE, things will again look so much better than they do now. Stay tuned for further announcements!

New graphics

We've added several new assets: tavern, settler house, sugarcane field and a lumberjack unit. Besides this, a lot more tent and hut variations await you. Settlements should look less boring while artists contribute more and more action sets for residential buildings.Thanks to everybody who worked on these new files! You can even find some of them on OpenGameArt!

Help Wanted

We are looking for help in all areas and added a widget to our main menu where we distribute the latest news.Especially cool are graphics for new buildings which allow us to implement further increments – but of course all kinds of support are welcome, no matter if you want to help out with game design, writing, translations, graphics or programming. If you like Unknown Horizons and want to offer your help or get started with the team, be sure to join our IRC Channel or leave us a message on the forums.

Download it!

If you already have an older version of Unknown Horizons installed, we suggest that you uninstall it before installing 2011.2! Also remove the .unknown-horizons folder found in your home directory!

You can find all new packages in the Downloads section of the website. The Windows installer comes bundled with a python distribution tailored for Unknown Horizons. Linux packages for Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint can be found in our repositories. Archlinux users can use the package in the AUR. A gentoo ebuild is available in the gamerlay overlay (layman -a gamerlay).Our new mac package right now is provided as bundled stand-alone version, so everything should work out of the box.

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this ;-)

Tearing buildings with collectors can cause trouble with savegames

The minimap zooms with your view. Temporary problem, fixed with next release of our engine.

Player names in main menu are discarded if a different game type is chosen

Deer might experience extinction for no obvious reason. We are still tweaking our wild animal ecosystem to iron out such cases

Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later

The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain

Placement of charcoal burning graphics is a bit off its area

When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy this release of Unknown Horizons. If you need support or want to leave us some feedback (please do!) contact us on IRC, the forums or via e-mail (team@unknown-horizons.org). If you like playing the game, please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a great motivation to all team members :-)

Good news for all Mac users out there. We have a first version of a Mac Package for our latest release.

Those of you that want to test it may download it here. Note that it is currently a first test image so errors or strange things might occur. If they do please help us at fixing them by reporting it to this topic at our forums.

and on top of this, Unknown Horizons now is completely compatible with DFSG guidelines. Check out the complete changelog here.

New graphics

We want to thank inken and manthus for the awesome job they did over the last months – you will notice it instantly after starting to settle. Without their work, we'd never replaced our remaining non-free content this quick! Also, novatlan contributed new ingame tracks which are just great. You can listen to them on our media page.

Increment 3: Settlers

Since we wanted to focus on creating more gameplay elements, you can now construct several new buildings and manage new production chains. Our fisher now uses boats and is planned to soon become even more complex, supporting ship assignment and upgrading. Enjoy!

Translations

The tutorial now supports four languages besides English. If you would like to help with the translation of Unknown Horizons and its tutorial into your native language, be sure to check out our Pootle server. Ask us on IRC if your language is missing!

DFSG compatibility

You might have wondered why we advertise this fact. Easy, it means that our chances of getting included in major distributions (think of Ubuntu) are high as never before! We now work hard to actually get shipped, there are some issues with packaging our engine and the pyenet binaries. Stay tuned for more information on this!

Help Wanted

We are looking for help in all areas and added a widget to our main menu where we distribute the latest news.Especially cool are graphics for new buildings which allow us to implement further increments – but of course all kinds of support are welcome, no matter if you want to help out with game design, translations, graphics or programming. If you like Unknown Horizons and want to offer your help or get started with the team, be sure to join our IRC Channel or leave us a message on the forums.

Download it!

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE AN OLDER VERSION OF UNKNOWN-HORIZONS INSTALLED, UNINSTALL IT BEFORE INSTALLING 2011.1! ALSO REMOVE THE .unknown-horizons FOLDER FOUND IN YOUR HOME DIRECTORY!

You can find all new packages in the Downloads section of the website. The Windows installer comes bundled with a python distribution tailored for Unknown Horizons. Linux packages for Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint can be found in our repositories. Archlinux users can use the package in the AUR. A gentoo ebuild is available in the gamerlay overlay (layman -a gamerlay).

Known issues

Since Unknown Horizons is still under development, we left some minor hints in our release to indicate this ;-)

Hunter and fisher sometimes decide to not do their job. We're clueless.

Fisher boats stay on the map after tearing: This is a feature, we will add a re-assign mechanism to other fishers later

The preview when placing an iron mine looks like placing a mountain

Placement of charcoal burning graphics is a bit off its area

When rotating view, some buildings may get confused about their Z coordinates

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy this release of Unknown Horizons. If you need support or want to leave us some feedback (please do!) contact us on IRC, the forums or via e-mail (team@unknown-horizons.org). If you like playing the game, please consider donating to the project. This helps with paying our servers and to continue development. It also serves as a great motivation to all developers :-).

Multiplayer

Our biggest feature is the new multi-player mode. It allows you to play with Unknown Horizons players from around the globe. Please be aware that the new multi-player mode is still quite unstable. If you are having trouble connecting to the other players, please visit our IRC channel. We will then try to find a solution and document it.

Tutorial

Our new tutorial is quite long and goes into a lot of details of the game. It is especially interesting for new players but even players of the former Unknown Horizons versions will find new information in the tutorial. We have created a framework on which we hope to create a campaign some time in the future. The main tutorial writer eoc has made a big effort in bringing you this nice scenario, so be sure to take a look!

Performance

Performance has been a big issue for Unknown Horizons since the beginning. The FIFE team worked very hard to speed up the rendering. The Result is a FPS rate which is 50-100% faster for most players. Of course we at Unknown Horizons also optimized our code in the hope for a more responsive game and improved a lot of core algorithms. We are not where we want to be, but we're getting there.

Translations

A lot of work has been put into the translation of Unknown Horizons. We are happy to present full translations into: German, French, Italian, Norwegian and Estonian. Plus some translations in good progress: Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. We can also present a full translation of the tutorial in German thanks to ottk3, who translated it within a day. If you would like to help with the translation of Unknown Horizons into your native language, be sure to checkout our Pootle server.

Help Wanted

We are looking for help in all areas, but we have a special need for new graphics. We need graphics for new buildings to allow us to implement further settler levels. All help is welcome, no matter if you want to help with game design, translations, graphics or programming. If you like Unknown Horizons and want to help with the development be sure to join our IRC Channel or leave us a message on the forums.

Download it!

You can find all of the new downloads in the Downloads section of the website. The Windows setup now comes bundled with an embedded python tailored for Unknown Horizons so there is no more need to have a full distribution of python installed on your computer. If you have an old version of Unknown Horizons installed please uninstall it prior to installing the new version!Linux packages for Ubuntu and Debian can be found in our repositories. Archlinux users can use the package in the AUR. A Gentoo overlay can be found using "layman -a unknown-horizons".

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy this release of Unknown Horizons. If you need support or want to leave us some feedback (please do!) contact us on IRC, the forums or via e-mail (team@unknown-horizons.org). If you like playing the game please consider donating to the project, so that we can pay the servers and continue development. It also serves as a great motivation to all developers :-).